Speer's Head

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Speer's Head

Demon animator Steve Speer wants to mess with your mind.

Steve Speer's plan for modern psychedelia, part one

Not long ago, computer artist and animator Steve Speer had a friend, Tracy, die in a car crash. He immediately recognized this as an opportunity. Not to deliver a eulogy or collect on some life-insurance scam, but to distort his friends' senses of reality. He called Tracy's pal Ducky and told her, "I just got a call from Colorado - Tracy's been killed."

Ducky had dealt with Speer before. "Is Tracy really dead, or are you lying to me?" she demanded.

"She's not dead."

"Why, you -"

"She's dead," Speer said calmly.

"Is she dead, or is she not dead?"

"She's not dead."

"Speer -"

"No, she's dead."

Click. Speer waited a few minutes before calling back. Ducky's daughter answered the phone: "Speer, Mommy's crying. She doesn't want to talk to you right now."

Steve Speer's plan for modern psychedelia, part two

Speer wedges himself into a small booth in a bar on New York City's Lower East Side. He begins spilling out philosophy, like a man who's had eight beers. Except Speer hasn't touched his first drink:

As humanity evolves through time, everybody changes. So now we're in twos: good and bad, black and white, yes and no.

Because there's two, there's a thing that connects them both, so we're automatically three. Whenever you have three, you can lay things on a plane. We're in three now, we think we're in two, and we're heading to four. This fourth point can go anywhere; it's called intuition. That's where we're headed, where we don't need this rational thing, which has only been around for 50 years. Not even. We're going to be more psychic in the future. That's what this millennium thing is about. We're more psychic now. And we can facilitate this by creating psychedelic experiences that work. I mean, I get paid to create psychedelic experiences. I'm not in the insane asylum, you know what I mean?

The Steve Speer experience

Speer believes that psychedelia means more than bubble fonts and Day-Glo wallpaper. To his mind, anything that fractures your bedrock set of beliefs qualifies. "Psychedelic means mind-expanding. You know, confusion. Dissolve and coagulate."

He rolls his personal ball of confusion into the world, not just with bad manners, but with computer graphics and animation that often look wholesome yet hide darker agendas. He also has a fluid relationship with biographical facts; in the space of an hour, he refers to himself as 36 and 35 years old and as somebody who did and did not read a lot of black literature in his youth. As Speer tells the story, he grew up by Woodhaven Boulevard, an eight-lane highway in Queens. His New York accent is so strong and nasal that he sounds like a Boston patrician - imagine JFK with a laptop and a pocketful of subway tokens.

As far back as high school, Speer says, he experimented with different techniques for reformatting his brain. He would go mute or stop wearing his glasses. Not for a few hours, or even a few days - he claims that each project lasted more than a year. When he couldn't see the blackboard, he learned other strategies. Speer encourages people to eschew drugs in favor of homegrown psychedelic experiences.

After seeing Tron in 1982, Speer felt like he was looking at the world in 3-D for the first time. Then, in 1985, he was driving through Queens with some friends when he saw an Amiga in a store window. He made them pull over. "When Amigas first came out, you couldn't do nothing with them, you know what I mean?" Speer complains. "So for like five years, I was waiting for computers to happen, so I could fucking use them - without getting a job at a corporation."

In the early '90s, Speer began to fucking use computers and even got a job for six months with Spectrum Holobyte doing games. "They were flushing money down the toilet," he remembers. "I said, 'Let's flush some of it down my toilet.'" He spent his free time with his new toys, turning his id loose like a PETA member freeing lab chimps. One early animation featured Charles Manson, a wolf screwing a sheep (the sheep morphed into Marilyn Monroe; the wolf became JFK), and Jackie O. eating JFK's brains. And there was an assassination sequence, except that when JFK gets shot, Speer cut away to a shot of himself jerking off on the Bible. Speer denies making the piece to offend, calling it his "sin offering." He says it just felt right. I think he means he succeeded in offending himself - and so he doesn't care what anybody else thinks.

Right now, his clients include Saturday Night Live, the MTV Music Awards, the Nickelodeon network, and (like so many other people profiled in these pages) Wired. Old Testament money shots don't fly as promos for Nickelodeon; that doesn't bother Speer at all. "I'm in the mood to do commercial stuff," he declares. "What is art? Art is pretentious."

Most of Speer's work has a happy, glossy, 3-D quality. Sometimes, for adult projects, that covers up an inner perversity. But his title sequence for "Flexy's Little Big Question" is pure rod-and-cone candy. Done for Nick Jr. (Nickelodeon for preschoolers), the clip - less than 10 seconds of animation - rushes through a world where technicolor flowers rotate their petals, bright blue fish jump into the air, a bright yellow insect rides a bright red bird, and we even quickly travel through a beehive. After 20 viewings, you can still pick out new details. It's perfect training for children growing up in a hyperstimulated world.

Speer even appeared in an ad for Samsung laptops, on the principle that anything that pays US$2,000 for a couple of hours' work is inherently a good idea. Of course, when he showed up for the shoot, he was disgusted at being lumped with a "brain trust" of other computer wizards. He gave everybody grief, refused to wear the preordained stylish clothes, and when his turn before the cameras came, dropped his pants and waggled his licking stick. "He has no underwear on!" somebody gasped; an ad agency employee worried out loud how they would ever show these contact sheets to the client.

Speer emerged from the shoot with a wad of cash and a Pentium laptop he had hijacked within minutes of showing up. He still uses the machine to try out new software and to diddle out the occasional sketch for an animation, but he's paid for it in anxiety. Speer spent months worrying where the ad would appear: for a time, he was afraid even to open up his subscription copies of Wired. To date, he's seen it only in the backwaters of The New York Times. Unsurprisingly, Samsung used a photo in which he's fully dressed. His porn career will have to wait.

Speer on Speer

Speer calls me up to exult over how a TV preacher has used some of his art as an example of the Work of Satan. We start talking about his image, and about how art travels through the larger culture. He recites a self-description he wrote for the Samsung campaign: "'Consumer of information, digital artist, virtual-world designer, and a tangle of matter and ghost, in the world and not of it,' that's what I put." And then he explains:

'A tangle of matter and ghost' is from an old Leonard Cohen song. 'In the world and not of it' is a biblical thing. I always try to work in these weird quotes; I started investigating the idea of swirling because of this line from Van Morrison about 'galactic swirl.' If the motion of the soul is circular - spinning like prayer wheels - is the hard drive an attempt to put the spin on the soul? It has nothing to do with technology - they spin really fast, so we put them where we would put prayer wheels, speak to them, and pray to them. You know what I mean?

Steve Speer's plan for modern psychedelia, part three

Speer was on his way to Nickelodeon's 1996 Halloween party, dressed as himself, when he was accosted by four Hungarian tourists. They needed to make a phone call and hoped he could instruct them in the mysteries of American phone booths. Speer took them to the party to use the phone there. They arrived en masse, the confused travelers had a great time, and Speer had a costume: He introduced himself to everyone as a Hungarian tourist.

The Speer party platform

Steve Speer believes a lot of things, and he doesn't worry too much whether they're consistent. He also doesn't back off from his opinions - unless, of course, he thinks doing so might confuse you. Speer party planks: You don't need to seek out pop culture, because it'll find you. George Bush was a billion times better than Bill Clinton. In fact, Clinton had his own mother killed. The three most important things in life are to make money, have fun, and make friends. "When you have fun, your head explodes and the bubble pops." There isn't much point in being modest. Time isn't linear. White kids should take pride in their European heritage - the media is teaching them to be homogenous. It's better to travel inside your head than around the world.

That last idea may be a bit of self-justi-fication: Speer doesn't know how to make hotel reservations. He owns no credit cards. He flies only when his sister-in-law gets him free tickets. He has a passport, but no driver's license - he's never driven a car. He's not especially adept with hardware: "I can barely do my laundry."

Steve Speer in the belly of the beast

Speer doesn't like anybody to come to his home in Queens, so we agree to meet at Rockefeller Center. I'm accompanying him to a Saturday Night Live meeting, but I'm a few minutes late, so when I arrive, Speer is standing with his back to the ice-skating rink, waiting, casing the joint. He says security guards have been giving him the eye and making him feel like a terrorist. Speer's tall - over 6 feet - and sports a full black beard with just a few white hairs. (A few weeks later, he'll shave it off.) Today he's wearing black jeans, a black denim jacket, a red button-down corduroy shirt, and a red backpack looped over both shoulders. With his loud voice, his accent, and his lack of restraint, he doesn't usually sneak up unnoticed.

Speer does animation for some of SNL's fake ads. The show is so haphazard, he says, it's actually a bad client. But he likes the people, and he enjoys seeing how they're always far more disorganized than he is. Up in NBC's 17th-floor offices, Speer picks out background photos from a book called Spanish Splendor, marking them with scraps of paper towel. Staffers bustle around us. Speer whispers, "These interns, they get paid nothing." Once Speer has his choices, we tiptoe into the office of producer Jim Signorelli, who's busy on the phone, trying to arrange that a dam be built for a shoot tomorrow in Central Park. Signorelli looks up at the assistant standing in front of him and barks the word "Speak." He doesn't notice the supplicant artist. Speer, so often brash, just stands with his hands in his pockets, quietly waiting for his audience.

The evanescent Steve Speer

Speer is striding down a New York sidewalk, practically shouting. I double-time to keep up. "If we can't be here now," he says, "then we're all really dead. We're animals, we can't win, and we lose. So my attitude is 'Yeah, we're lost, we're dead. Now, what are we going to do about it?' Let's do something, man! We're going to be dead in 30 years anyway! And whatever I accomplish is no good anyway. It's gone, dust. Videotape, hard drives - they're dust. Mount Rushmore will be gone in 500 years, if not less. It won't even hold as well as a pyramid. We're all standing on shifting sand."

Speer mentions a guy he knows who has thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment but gets nothing done, always complaining that he needs one more card or plug-in. "You can create without having. You can say something that means something. I'm reading all these Yeats poems, and he has this great line: 'I made this with a mouthful of air.'" Speer's accent is so strong, I have to double-check with him that Yeats did not, in fact, have a mouthful of ash.

Steve Speer's plan for modern psychedelia, part four

If you watch Speer's 1995 video Escape To/From Catatonia (more full disclosure: it's available through Wired Ventures), these are some of the images you'll see: wagon wheels, rotating eyeballs backed with circuitry, the words "Your Meat Is Alive," pink babies, hearts with two wings and one eye, the words "Abort Abort Abort," tree trunks, decapitated heads of Christ, men playing accordions, binary numbers, words you can't quite make out, and emaciated green men riding on pigs.

None are in isolation. They spin by the dozen in overlapping, weaving, flickering circles. Speer has thousands of rendered objects on his hard drives and disks; although he may sample a hand or a nose from his old work, he usually animates new totems for each project. When you watch Catatonia, your brain is forced to draw its own connections or just go blank. Catatonia is hypnotic and free-associative; just don't allow any epileptics within 10 blocks. Most people see the tape as purely abstract - perfect background for a rave - but Speer says it contains hidden meanings. When he designs a color, he might call it "Today's news: Clinton sucks" instead of green, and take pleasure in how the infrastructure supports his politics. "Where does the embedded begin and end?" he asks. "Does it begin when I use certain words that I know what they mean, but you don't?"

How Speer is spending his free time: rendering vast 3-D landscapes, including the 1892 World's Fair, the original Madison Square Garden, and Nikola Tesla's laboratory. "A lot of my friends are mechanics or construction people," he says. "But I can brag that I'm not building anything for this world." Speer is a classic autodidact; he never goes to libraries (they feel too sanitized and official), but he prowls through used bookstores, tracing paths of his obsessions. Speer's lineage is half-German and half-Irish; after reading far too much material on the Nazis, he decided that he'd be better off exploring his Irish cultural background. Curiosity about leprechauns brought him to the wider field of Celtic folklore, which recently led him to explore the world of James Joyce. Worried he's growing too old to play the always-amped confrontation artist, Speer says he's searching for ways to age gracefully. Lately, he's tried distilling some of his research and philosophy into a novel. He's written 200 pages, but he doesn't think anybody will be able to understand it.

Speer was also responsible for The Stimples, a cartoon series for the online network Stim that felt like one of his Nickelodeon promos in the midst of an epidemic of Legionnaires' disease. Featuring a TV station, rebellious religious cults, date-raping rock stars, and, oddly enough, musical-comedy numbers, The Stimples relied on visual appeal and shock value more than on actual narrative. When Stim asked him to do something edgy, he decided he wanted to rub their noses in it. Speer and Mikki Halpin, Stim's editor in chief, had some run-ins. "When we negotiated his contract," she says, "he pulled this huge wad of cash out of his backpack and said, 'I don't need your fucking money! Don't fuck with me on this shit!'"

My favorite Speer

Speer brings me along on a trip to Nickelodeon, but because he wants to avoid explaining his business to the receptionist, he calls a friend to let him in a back door. While we wait, he fills the silence:

I don't want to be glib - I'd rather be a little more visceral. When I talk to you, I want to at least engage you, so you say, 'OK, well I'm having some kind of experience here.' I probably don't do it for you, I do it as much for me: I get to talk, and I get to feel my soul vibrating. And that's a very selfish thing. There's not much altruism happening there.

You know, some people say I'm the nicest guy in the world, and some hate me. But most people like me. I get a lot of work, and a big part of getting work is going in there and having people like you. An illustrator friend of mine was in town, and I told her that I'd take her to the Nickelodeon offices. So I bring her up there, and she's a dead fucking fish. I said to her later, 'Listen, you gotta go in there and vibe these people. Nobody wants to be bored, you know what I mean?'

Steve Speer, public relations man

Speer and I go out drinking with his friend Arthur. Speer tells stories about living up to people's worst expectations, like his habit a couple of years back of wiping his ass with napkins and throwing them at people. "Then I decided that was too simian," he says.

We talk about Nintendo's 64-bit Super Mario game for a while, then Speer has a moment of regret over how his tales of antisocial behavior will play in Wired. "I don't want to be presented as some sort of freak," he tells me.

Arthur snorts. "You've done a good job of it tonight."

Speer considers, then replies: "Well, I don't want to be presented as some sort of hostile freak."